Gustav Noske

Gustav Noske (9 July 1868-30 November 1946) was the Minister of Defense of the Weimar Republic from February 1919 to March 1920, preceding Otto Gessler. Noske was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and he used army and paramilitary forces to put down communist rebels.

Biography
Gustav Noske was born on 9 July 1868 in Brandenburg an der Havel, Prussia, the son of two laborers. Noske worked as a basket maker before joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1884, and he became the chairman of the Brandenburg SPD in 1892. From 1906 to 1918, he represented Chemnitz in the Reichstag as an SPD member of parliament, and he was among the SPD leaders who supported World War I as a defensive measure. In November 1918, he was one of the leaders of the German Revolution, and he led the Freikorps in putting down the Spartacus League's revolt in January 1919. Over the first half of 1919, Noske oversaw the crushing of left-wing uprisings across Germany, using the regular Reichswehr army and the paramilitary Freikorps to achieve this. In 1920, he became the governor of Hanover, and he would later become a political conservative, supporting Paul von Hindenburg's presidency. In 1933, he was relieved of his duties by the Nazi Party due to his socialist beliefs, and he was imprisoned at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944 after being suspected of complicity in the Operation Valkyrie bomb plot against Hitler. He was freed from the Gestapo by the Allied Powers in 1945, and he died of a stroke in November 1946 before he could embark on a lecture tour of the United States.